Previews

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Spiffy:

Touch-based and traditional control; improvements to old content; new content.

Iffy:

Won't change haters' minds; amount of new content is up in the air.

We had the good fortune to visit LucasArts' San Francisco offices recently, to get an exclusive first hands-on with the upcoming Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, including the DS version of the game. The DS version was actually designed from the ground up by Traveller's Tales to take advantage of the platform. In our hands-on, it definitely felt like a full version of the franchise -- a sharp improvement over The Original Trilogy's DS appearance.

A More Elegant Weapon

The Complete Saga will ship with all of the content from the original two Lego Star Wars games, and will incorporate the improvements of Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy as well. That means, most importantly, you aren't limited to Force-using characters in order to build things. That also means improvement to Force powers, which is also pretty important to the gameplay. And your Prequel characters will be able to hop in and out of their created vehicles. But the most important Lego Star Wars II improvement that's now across all six episodes is the Character Customizer.

With the Complete Saga, you'll be able to take all the Prequel Trilogy characters through the Character Customizer. Yes, we find the idea of having a Lando Amidala to play as awesome, all right? The vehicle levels won't be substantially changed, with the Episodes I-III content being the on-rails gameplay they always were. The exceptions will be the Mos Espa Podrace and Gunship Cavalry levels, which are being redesigned to "encourage the open vehicle gameplay of Lego Star Wars II." Unfortunately, these redesigned levels weren't ready when we saw The Complete Saga, so we'll let you know how they fare once we actually get to see them.

In addition to incorporating II's improvements, The Complete Saga will include new levels, new characters, and more Bounty Hunter missions. The new Bounty Hunter missions will send you into the Prequel Trilogy, and the new character choices should bring the total selection of playable characters over 160. New levels will include choice parts of the films that the games have missed, such as a speeder chase after the bounty hunter in Episode II. That bounty hunter, Zam Wessell, is one of the newly playable characters. Others will include Boss Nass, Lama Su, R5-D4 and Watto, so we will admit that some of the new guys aren't quite A-list -- on the other hand, it means we should be able to make Darth Maul with a Watto head, which is entertaining.